Wednesday, January 09, 2013

Great Forrester Comment - "PMO's are Becoming Incredibly..."

One of my favorite quotes on the PMO comes from this frank and humorous comment from Dave West, VP Research Director at Forrester Research. You can hear him and the other panelists on Agile Portfolio Management Q & A Panel at the link below. Dave's comment starts at 1:30.

"It's interesting, what we at Forrester have observed across the industry this particular kind of maniacal kind of addition to the program management kind of practice. PMO's have grown in size and stature in organizations and become incredibly…big, in terms of their execution. One thing that it illustrates is that complexity does not solve complexity. As organizations wrestle with increasingly diverse portfolio, time-to-market pressures, one thing that they want to do is add more complexity. "When in doubt, add more governance!","When in doubt, add more people to manage the people that are managing the people!" "When in doubt, get more Gannt charts!" And I think that we've found that that does not work. I think it's clear that breakthrough companies or companies that are definitely driving the industry around change and innovation are not solving those problems with complexity."